Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer

Summary

From the author of the award-winning Vermeer's Hat, a historical detective story decoding a long-forgotten link between seventeenth century Europe and China.

Timothy Brook's award-winning Vermeer's Hat unfolded the early history of globalization, using Vermeer's paintings to show how objects like beaver hats and porcelain bowls began to circulate around the world. Now he plumbs the mystery of a single artifact that offers new insights into global connections centuries old.

In 2009, an extraordinary map of China was discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library-where it had first been deposited 350 years before, then stowed and forgotten for nearly a century. Neither historians of China nor cartography experts had ever seen anything like it. It was so odd that experts would have declared it a fake-yet records confirmed it had been delivered to Oxford in 1659. The “Selden Map,” as it is known, was a puzzle that needing solving.

Brook, a historian of China, set out to explore the riddle. His investigation will lead readers around this elegant, enigmatic work of art, and from the heart of China, via the Southern Ocean, to the court of King James II. In the story of Selden's map, he reveals for us the surprising links between an English scholar and merchants half a world away, and offers novel insights into the power and meaning that a single map can hold. Brook delivers the same anecdote-rich narrative, intriguing characters, and unexpected historical connections that made Vermeer's Hat an instant classic.

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Mr. Selden's Map of China - Timothy Brook

This book is for my uncommon reader,

Fay Sims.

It is also dedicated to the memory of

Neil Burton, fellow traveller always one

step ahead.

Item. I give and bequeathe to the said Chancelor Masters and Schollars a Mapp of China made there fairly and done in colloure together with a Sea Compasse of their making and Devisione taken both by an englishe comander who being pressed exceedingly to restore it at good ransome would not parte with it.

codicil to John Selden’s will

11 June 1653

Contents

Dramatis Personae

Dramatis Loci

Timeline

Preface

1. What’s Wrong with this Map?

2. Closing the Sea

3. Reading Chinese in Oxford

4. John Saris and the China Captain

5. The Compass Rose

6. Sailing from China

7. Heaven is Round, Earth is Square

8. Secrets of the Selden Map

Epilogue: Resting Places

Acknowledgements and Sources

Plate Section

Footnotes

Appendix I. Boxing the Chinese Compass

Appendix II. Coast Comparison

Illustrations

Also by Timothy Brook

Dramatis Personae

Will ADAMS (1564–1620): English pilot shipwrecked in Japan in 1600 while serving on a Dutch ship; captained several voyages for the East India Company between Japan and South-East Asia, 1614–18

Richard COCKS (1566–1624): English merchant and head of the trading post established by the East India Company in Japan between 1613 and 1623

GIOLO [geeolo] (c. 1661–1692): Pacific Islander captured by Muslim slave traders in the 1680s and sold into service in Mindanao; died in Oxford in 1692

Thomas HYDE (1636–1703): Oriental scholar, appointed Assistant Keeper of the Bodleian Library in 1659 and Keeper in 1665, a post he held until 1701; appointed Laudian Professor of Arabic in 1691 and Regius Professor of Hebrew in 1697; annotator of the Selden map

Ben JONSON (1572–1637): poet, satirist, playwright, entertainer at the court of King James I, bosom friend and admirer of John Selden

William LAUD (1573–1645): appointed Bishop of London in 1628, elected Chancellor of Oxford in 1630, consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633; executed by Parliament in 1645

LI Dan [lee dan] (b. 1560s; d. 1625): ‘China Captain’ of Japan, or head of the Chinese community in Hirado; landlord of the East India Company factory; business associate of Richard Cocks; mentor of Zheng Zhilong, whose son Zheng Chenggong founded the Eastern Calm kingdom on Taiwan

Samuel PURCHAS (before 1577–1626): chaplain turned editor who published a series of popular collections of travellers’ tales, starting in 1613 with Purchas his Pilgrimage and culminating in 1625 with Purchas his Pilgrimes; erstwhile friend of John Selden and acquaintance of John Saris

John SARIS (1579/80–1643): employee of the East India Company in Bantam, 1605–9; commander of the Company’s Eighth Voyage, 1611–14

Dramatis Loci

BANTAM, also Bantan, Bantem: a city-state at the western end of Java; the first trading port for Europeans arriving in the South China Sea and home for John Saris, 1604–9; eclipsed by Batavia after 1619

BATAVIA (Jakarta): a port city in west Java, occupied by the Dutch in 1619 and made the base of operations of the Dutch East India Company (VOC)

HAINAN ISLAND: large island off the south coast of China’s Guangdong province, known as Qiongzhou prefecture in the Ming dynasty

HIRADO: port town in Kyushu, near Nagasaki; as of 1609, one of the few ports in Japan where Chinese and European traders were permitted to reside; home for a time of Li Dan and Richard Cocks

PARACEL ISLANDS, also Western Shoals (Xisha), also Hoàng Sa Islands: a scattering of tiny islands in the north-western quarter of the South China Sea claimed by China and Vietnam

RYUKYU ISLANDS: a string of islands, of which the largest is Okinawa, between Japan and Taiwan; an independent kingdom that submitted tribute to Ming China but was under Japanese domination from the sixteenth century; formally annexed to Japan in 1895

SPRATLY ISLANDS, also Southern Shoals (Nansha): a scattering of tiny islands north-west of Borneo in the South China Sea, claimed by China, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines

THE TEMPLE: area of London between Fleet Street and the Thames, former home of the Knights Templar and latterly the precinct of the Inner and Middle Temples, two of the four Inns of Court to which English barristers are affiliated; site of John Selden’s office in the Inner Temple and of his grave in the Temple Church

TERNATE: a small island in the Moluccas (Malukus), or Spice Islands, centre of the spice trade in the seventeenth century; first ‘discovered’ by Portuguese in 1512; visited by Francis Drake in 1580 and John Saris in 1613; co-occupied by Spain and the Netherlands from 1607 to 1663

Timeline

Preface

Rarely does an old map make front-page news, but the map of the world that Martin Waldseemüller produced in 1507 did just that when the Library of Congress acquired it in 2003. The Waldseemüller map has been called America’s birth certificate, and it cost the nation $10 million. It is beautiful, certainly, printed from twelve woodblocks so finely carved that the Jesuit schoolteacher who rediscovered the map in 1901, Joseph Fischer, assumed it to be the handiwork of the great artist Albrecht Dürer. It wasn’t, but it was worthy of the mistake. As many as a thousand copies of this enormous map of the world may have been printed from these woodblocks, yet the only copy to survive is the one now on display in the foyer of the Library of Congress.

The map fetched the price it did because of one tiny detail. This is the first map on which the name America appears. Martin Waldseemüller inscribed it on a blank space in South America, roughly where we would locate Paraguay. Quite how much of the wraith-like landform snaking its way up the left-hand side of the map from the Antarctic to the Arctic the term was meant to name is unclear, but the Congress of the United States agreed that it covered enough to satisfy them. So there it is: a new name for a new continent, and all because Waldseemüller was a big fan of the explorer–geographer Amerigo Vespucci. Had he been an enthusiast of Christopher Columbus, he might have called the new continent Columbia. But no, for him Vespucci was the discoverer of the New World.

Nine years after the map was published, Waldseemüller abandoned his innovative model of the world for a very different design, thereby rendering the 1507 original redundant. It was now a map without a future. This one copy survived only because a free-spirited priest-turned-mathematician named Johannes Schöner bought and preserved it some time before he died in 1547. He put it in a leather-bound portfolio, which ended up in Wolfegg Castle in southern Germany. It came to light only because in 1901 the castle archivist, Hermann Hafner, heard that a schoolteacher just across the border in Austria was interested in historical documents and offered him the run of the castle library. That schoolteacher, Joseph Fischer, was a Viking enthusiast looking for sources on the early Norse voyages. Without all these serendipitous connections, the map might never have crossed the five centuries that separate us from Waldseemüller. Johannes Schöner, the actor in this history closest to its beginning, feared the indifference with which objects by which one can investigate the past – indeed anything – could be treated. ‘You know the times’, he complained in 1533. The arts and sciences ‘are so silent and neglected, it may be feared that the idiots will wipe them out’.

The book you are about to read revolves around a different map, the Selden map, so called because an English lawyer by the name of John Selden bequeathed it to the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1654. The most important Chinese map of the last seven centuries, it maps the slice of the world that Chinese at the time knew, from the Indian Ocean in the west to the Spice Islands in the east, and from Java in the south to Japan in the north. It exists today because it came into the hands of John Selden, who shared Johannes Schöner’s passion to ensure the survival of knowledge, and not just English knowledge but all knowledge, even Chinese, although it was a language he couldn’t read. It is fortunate that he did so, for unlike the thousand Waldseemüllers that were printed, the Selden map is a singleton, drawn and painted by hand, the only one of its kind.

It is a large map, measuring 160 cm (63 in.) in length and 96½ cm (38 in.) in width. That makes it only half the size of the Waldseemüller (16⅔ sq. ft compared to 34 sq. ft), but still it must count as the largest wall map of its time and place. As neither China nor Europe produced sheets of paper that large, making wall maps on this scale required ingenuity. The largest sheet of paper available to the man who drew the Selden map was 65 × 128 cm (25½ × 50½ in.). He solved the size problem by taking two sheets, cutting one lengthwise down the middle and gluing one of the halves down the side of the other sheet, then trimming the length of the remaining half and gluing it along the bottom. Waldseemüller worked with smaller sheets of paper (42 × 77 cm, 16½ × 30½ in.). Rather than glue them together, he divided his map into twelve sections, printed it on twelve sheets from twelve separate woodblocks and left it to the buyer to assemble them into a single map. Then map design changed, and all the buyers but one threw their dozen sheets away. Schöner’s set survived only because it disappeared into a library, which is just what happened to the Selden map. Both have now re-emerged – Waldseemüller’s a century ago, Selden’s just a few years back – to great public interest.

Both maps are terrifically important, in different ways. Waldseemüller drew his map just at the moment when the New World was coming into view. Europe’s novel encounter with the world forced him to bend the existing mapmaking template to breaking point, and then to abandon it nine years later in favour of a new geometry better capable of encompassing the entire globe. So too in its way the Selden map bore the impact of China’s encounter with the same world, seen from the other side of the globe. The man who drew the map acknowledged long-established traditions of how to draw China, but he also stepped outside that tradition to picture the lands that lay beyond China in a fashion no other Chinese cartographer had ever done. Not unlike Waldseemüller, he re-designed the world in response to an avalanche of new data about how the lands and seas beyond his native place actually lay on the surface of the earth. He also created a thing of considerable if subtle beauty, wallpapering the land mass of eastern Asia with mountains, trees and flowering plants – and the occasional whimsical detail. The two errant butterflies fluttering about in the Gobi Desert are my favourites.

It took a century for the map that names America to find its new home in the Library of Congress, where it occupies what many regard as its rightful place in the pantheon of foundational documents celebrating their nation. Will fate touch the Selden map in the same way? Painstakingly (and expensively) restored in 2011, it is now on display in the Bodleian Library. Will its story end there? Should some decide that this map has a foundational role to play in the celebration of China’s national identity, its future could become complicated. But the Selden map is not China’s birth certificate. Neither the Chinese name for China – Zhongguo – nor the name of the reigning dynasty – Ming – appears on it, but then China has been around for so long that neither would carry significant weight at this late moment in its history.

Not a birth certificate, then, but potentially an adoption certificate? China is currently in dispute with every maritime nation in East Asia over who may rightfully claim sovereignty over the thousands of islands that dot the East and South China Seas. The best-known, because most noisily contested, are the Diaoyu Islands north-east of Taiwan, and the Paracel and Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. As the Selden map is the only detailed and geographically specific Chinese depiction of these waters before the nineteenth century, some hope that this long-lost map may be the winning card in the diplomatic game China plays with its neighbours. Over the course of this book I will indicate my doubt in this regard and show that the Selden map has nothing to say about such topics. But patriotic sentiment and national interest are powerful forces against knowledge for its own sake, so who can say? The Selden map has been valued for insurance purposes at three-fifths the price of the Waldseemüller map. This is an arbitrary estimate for an object that has been off the market for almost four centuries. If it ever goes back on, the bidding will surely go much higher.

I have not devoted an entire book to a single map in order to deliver an Antiques Roadshow punchline. Rather, I take the map as an occasion to explore the age in which it was made. It was an age of remarkable creativity and change. New vistas were opening, old horizons faltering, accepted truths giving way to controversial new ideas. Ordinary people in their hundreds of thousands were on the move in search of work, survival and adventure. Ships in their tens of thousands were sailing from every port in Europe and Asia. Commodities produced on one continent were reshaping economies on another. Against this background William Shakespeare was premiering The Tempest, Ben Jonson inventing the musical to amuse King James I, and John Donne being pressured by that same monarch to give up love poetry for sermon-writing, and excelling at both. John Selden was among this crowd, living life to the full in London and dutifully churning out poems while he was supposed to be studying law. The poems were decidedly second-rate: the younger man had yet to find his metier. His monumental achievements in Oriental scholarship and constitutional law lay ahead of him. But he too would change the fabric of English society just as surely as these more famous authors did. And as all this unfolded, the map that bears his name would come into his hands.

I do not begin the book with the map itself, for there are many other things to think about before we ever get to the Selden map. We have to dig first in other fields, in part because there exists basically no documentation that can tell us anything about the map. The map itself complicates its own story by having travelled half-way around the world and ending up among people who viewed it very differently from the man who made it, thereby doubling the stories that can be told about it. Far more than just a passive illustration of its age, it is a densely worked document that will reveal much about the times and places in which it was drawn, viewed and graffitied. Knowing both less and more than what the mapmaker knew, we will have to do much digging to find out how to read it.

Odd as this may seem, one book is not enough to open all the doors hidden in the details of the map, let alone travel all the corridors that lead from these doors, still less to enter all the rooms that open off the corridors. Those I have been able to enter have disclosed a mad variety of events and personalities that I never expected to encounter when I first looked at the map. They include the burning of Japanese erotica in London, the trade policies of Emperor Wanli, the design of the Chinese compass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s intentional misspelling of Xanadu, the donation of human remains to the Bodleian Library, and the ancestral church of the Knights Templar, to mention but a few. The only topic among these that I could have predicted was the compass; everything else came as a surprise. But all of it must be taken into account if we hope to give the Selden map, about which nothing certain is known, the history it deserves.

In the end, this book is not really about a map. It is about the people whose stories intersected with it. The venture succeeds if I can demonstrate how rich, how complicated and how globally networked this era was. The map stands as a reminder – a warning, even – that our understanding of our own time will be enfeebled if we remain ignorant of the earlier practices of gaining wealth and power that have led us to our present impasse. Of course, no one back in the seventeenth century could have anticipated that the small-scale deals and conflicts going on around the South China Sea were early rumblings of the age of empire to follow, or of the age of state-corporate alliances in which we find ourselves. The traders and sailors travelling across the surface of the Selden map were simply in it for the money and thought no more about it. Curious that a desire so uninteresting could remake the world. But then why should we presume to think that our age is any different from theirs? As Johannes Schöner so bluntly put it, ‘You know the times.’

1

What’s Wrong with this Map?

In the summer of 1976 I left China through Friendship Pass. As the train crawled into northern Vietnam through the rounded hills south of the pass, we gazed down into steep gullies crisscrossing the landscape beneath us. In some of the deeper gullies narrow streams gurgling with spring water were left to follow their natural courses. In others, the streambeds had been widened into rice paddies, the heads of the rice plants still green and not ready to harvest. An overturned steam locomotive lay in one of those gullies, its charred carcass sprawled on its back like some ruined Jurassic beast. Signs of the Vietnam War, which had ended just a year before, still littered the landscape, occasionally dramatically – beneath every railway bridge lay the twisted girders of all the other bridges it had replaced – more often inconspicuously. Already the war was being forgotten. The very landscape seemed ready to forget it. Looking down on the locomotive, I could imagine the subtropical vegetation of the gully simply growing up around the defeated machine and gently swallowing it from sight before the recovery crews could arrive.

Friendship Pass is the Orwellian name for the rail junction connecting big-brother China to little-brother Vietnam. Honoured as a site of friendship between the two countries, it has just as often been a barrier of animosity across which the two sides have eyed each other suspiciously, and occasionally launched a wasteful invasion. It would be China’s turn to invade in 1979, but that piece of folly was still three years off that peaceful and beautiful summer when I came through the pass. I was leaving China at the end of a two-year stint as an exchange student, heading home via a long detour that would take me through Laos, Burma, India and Afghanistan.

We approached the pass from the north. The Chinese train shuddered to a halt, and everyone had to alight to go through border inspection inside the station before switching to the Vietnamese train, which ran on a narrower gauge. Those who weren’t Chinese or Vietnamese – there were only two of us – were set aside for special treatment. When my turn came, the brusque customs officer asked me to open my backpack so that he could inspect the contents. He was looking for something, and in no time he found it.

A month before leaving Shanghai, I had gone to the customs office to arrange the shipping of my books and few possessions back to Canada prior to my departure by train through Vietnam. I had to unpack and present everything for the inspection of the customs official whose job it was to check what foreigners were sending out of China. The official, a man at mid-career wearing the uniform of the customs department, was pleasant enough; he was also thorough. After going through my books and papers closely, he set aside two things I could not send out of the country. Both were maps. One was a national atlas, the other a wall map of China. I had bought both at the Nanjing Road branch of New China Bookstore, the official – virtually the only – book retailer in the country, and still had the receipts to prove it. They were not marked ‘for internal circulation’, the label printed inside the vast majority of books, which we, as foreigners, were forbidden from buying. We had access only to ‘open circulation’ publications. It was one of those amusing Möbius strips of Cultural Revolution reasoning: the dignity of the nation would not permit Chinese to know everything foreigners knew, but it would not permit foreigners inside China to know the portion of what we knew that Chinese knew.

When I pestered the customs official in Shanghai to know why I couldn’t keep them, he blandly pointed out that of course I could keep them; I just couldn’t send them out of the country. When I pushed a little harder, he closed the subject down by informing me that maps had a bearing on national security. In those days, and probably these days as well, national security was the ultimate trump card of Chinese officials seeking to restrict foreign students’ access to Chinese society. What that bearing actually was, no one could say. The only maps